13 ms·

firefox os had so much potential, now with pwa's being the next big thing, it seem like firefox os could be a game changer. Too bad they killed it.

by type-2 7y ago

herogreen 7y ago
what is pwa ?
- ronsor 7y ago
  Progressive Web Apps
- r3bl 7y ago
  Progressive Web App. A web app that's supposed to be indistinguishable from the native one, built using web technologies (so that you don't have to maintain multiple code bases). When Firefox OS was around, they were still pretty niche.
i4blux 7y ago
Firefox OS was doomed to fail. They created an operating system which used the slowest rendering and JS engine there was and put it in the worst hardware they could find.
- icebraining 7y ago
  These phones run on the same rendering and JS engine... "KaiOS apps are based on web technologies–HTML, CSS, and JavaScript–and are run by Gecko runtime." https://developer.kaiostech.com/ https://developer.kaiostech.com/
  - 0815test 7y ago
    Except that Firefox is phasing out Gecko and replacing it with Servo (we're not yet there but some components have been replaced already - this is what the Firefox Quantum thing was all about). So this KaiOS thing is basically picking up an abandoned project...
    - Sylos 7y ago
      Servo is nowhere near production-ready and there's no reason to assume that it will be anytime soon. Just consider that Mozilla is pretty much working full-pelt on Gecko and merely keeping up with Google. They (as well as Google) are far away from implementing all currently specified web-standards, of which more get specified all the time. So, in order to get Servo to the level of current browser engines, they would have to have an even higher developmemt velocity, while not really being able to stop developing Gecko in the meantime either. Maybe if the majority of components someday are shared between Gecko and Servo, they might do the final step and switch out the core completely, but even that is still far away. Servo is specifically a research project. To explore what could be done, if one were to do things right. That they were able to isolate and share components, that even came as a surprise to Mozilla.
      - brighteyes 7y ago
        Also, Servo isn't a general-purpose browser project anymore at Mozilla. It's part of the "Mixed Reality" department: https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/ https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/
      - StudentStuff 7y ago
        Servo, while a research project, is also a place to build the fastest possible implementation of a browser (w/o full backwards compatibility), then crib the best performing parts and move that into mainline Firefox (what Project Quantum is, a metered replacement of Gecko). Swapping out the jet engine of Firefox in flight (Gecko) was likely to be a very bumpy, messy road, thus Mozilla has chosen to break the problem down into manageable chunks by having a parallel team build Servo and push the bleeding edge of performance & features, while having another team break the new code (Servo) and the old code (Gecko) apart into the separate , interchangeable pieces, then clean up standards compliance in the new Servo module and prep it to be replaced. Essentially, its the Cathedral vs the Bazaar all over again. Microsoft Edge was a ground up rewrite of most of the browser (the Cathedral model of software dev) along with Android (built behind closed doors at Google, then code dumped right before a new major release). Mozilla didn't like how this model could easily backfire, choosing a more metered approach by developing smaller, swappable components in the open. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    Gecko is the rendering engine. The JS engine is called SpiderMonkey.
jschwartzi 7y ago
I'd be interested in this on a modern smartphone platform with a touchscreen and virtual keyboard just to cut Google out of my life.
- auslander 7y ago
  > just to cut Google out of my life. Apple?
  - JetSpiegel 7y ago
    Out of the frying pan into the fire...
    - auslander 7y ago
      So it looks, but, realistically is the only option for phones. And it is not an adtech company, you pay for hardware and software.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- meruru 7y ago
  Why not run Lineage OS then?
  - Arelius 7y ago
    I dunno, switching from a phone with a pre-installed Google maintained OS to a custom rom of a Google maintained OS isn't exactally fully cutting Google out.
    - Yetanfou 7y ago
      AOSP and its derivatives may be maintained by Google but they don't call home without the proprietary Google apps. Just leave those off and use something like F-Droid to get apps and you're Google-free. None of the Android devices I use (phones and tablets) has any Google-proprietary code installed, all of them work fine without such.
thinkloop 7y ago
They needed the resources to integrate pocket into firefox
cronix 7y ago
It's kind of funny that PWA was Jobs original vision for iOS apps with HTML5, before they came up with the walled garden cash cow approach. > “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.” - Steve Jobs/iPhone announcement Jan 2007 at macworld https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/2019-the-year-of-progressive-web-apps-3027aea291f9 https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/2019-the-year-of-progr... What's old, is new again, 12 years later. It's how it always should have been. And guess what? There's no SDK that you need!! ;)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  An idea that was already being explored on Symbian with their WebRuntime actually. https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Web_Technologies/Web_Runtime/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum....
  - stuaxo 7y ago
    I feel like the whole Symbian ecosystem disappeared, it's a shame nobody is preserving any of the software, that was 10+ years of tech that is basically gone.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Quite true. All what is left seems to be Web Archive and these sites. http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/ http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  It's not like this went away, though. You could always, and still can, write iOS apps this way. Safari even has the "add to home screen" feature which lets you run these apps without the Safari chrome around them.
on_and_off 7y ago
I don't know about its potential but what was there was not a serious challenger to the existing platforms. I was working for a very large app (tens of millions of daily users) at the time when firefox was trying to convince companies to port their apps to it. We were big enough that Firefox sent their advocates to our offices and tried to convince us to port our app. Since what we were offering was a service, we were naturally open to have it on as many platforms as possible. I think that there might have been a monetary incentive as well but I might be misremembering there (I was not part of that negotiation). After a week with their sdk and help from their devs, we threw the towel. Publishing our product on Fos would have been impossible while keeping the app quality on par with iOS and Android and there were lots of missing/buggy APIs. That was our last discussion with Firefox. For as long as there have been phones, there have been web apps targeting them, but there is a reason why we are still building native apps.
barbecue_sauce 7y ago
Are PWAs the next big thing? I thought the hype for PWAs had for the most part fizzled due to lack of user interest.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  It’s not the users that are pushing native apps on every website. It’s not even the developers. It’s the media and add companies that realise that they can get away with things in a native app that a browser would never allow.
stuaxo 7y ago
I hope it's got a lot more polished, I got one of the first firefox phones and it was pretty unusable in most areas. I pretty quickly got an Android phone instead.

firefox os had so much potential, now with pwa's being the next big thing, it seem like firefox os could be a game changer. Too bad they killed it.

by type-2 7y ago

firefox os had so much potential, now with pwa's being the next big thing, it seem like firefox os could be a game changer. Too bad they killed it.

herogreen 7y ago

what is pwa ?

ronsor 7y ago
Progressive Web Apps
r3bl 7y ago
Progressive Web App. A web app that's supposed to be indistinguishable from the native one, built using web technologies (so that you don't have to maintain multiple code bases). When Firefox OS was around, they were still pretty niche.

i4blux 7y ago

Firefox OS was doomed to fail. They created an operating system which used the slowest rendering and JS engine there was and put it in the worst hardware they could find.

icebraining 7y ago
These phones run on the same rendering and JS engine... "KaiOS apps are based on web technologies–HTML, CSS, and JavaScript–and are run by Gecko runtime." https://developer.kaiostech.com/ https://developer.kaiostech.com/
- 0815test 7y ago
  Except that Firefox is phasing out Gecko and replacing it with Servo (we're not yet there but some components have been replaced already - this is what the Firefox Quantum thing was all about). So this KaiOS thing is basically picking up an abandoned project...
  - Sylos 7y ago
    Servo is nowhere near production-ready and there's no reason to assume that it will be anytime soon. Just consider that Mozilla is pretty much working full-pelt on Gecko and merely keeping up with Google. They (as well as Google) are far away from implementing all currently specified web-standards, of which more get specified all the time. So, in order to get Servo to the level of current browser engines, they would have to have an even higher developmemt velocity, while not really being able to stop developing Gecko in the meantime either. Maybe if the majority of components someday are shared between Gecko and Servo, they might do the final step and switch out the core completely, but even that is still far away. Servo is specifically a research project. To explore what could be done, if one were to do things right. That they were able to isolate and share components, that even came as a surprise to Mozilla.
    - brighteyes 7y ago
      Also, Servo isn't a general-purpose browser project anymore at Mozilla. It's part of the "Mixed Reality" department: https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/ https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/
    - StudentStuff 7y ago
      Servo, while a research project, is also a place to build the fastest possible implementation of a browser (w/o full backwards compatibility), then crib the best performing parts and move that into mainline Firefox (what Project Quantum is, a metered replacement of Gecko). Swapping out the jet engine of Firefox in flight (Gecko) was likely to be a very bumpy, messy road, thus Mozilla has chosen to break the problem down into manageable chunks by having a parallel team build Servo and push the bleeding edge of performance & features, while having another team break the new code (Servo) and the old code (Gecko) apart into the separate , interchangeable pieces, then clean up standards compliance in the new Servo module and prep it to be replaced. Essentially, its the Cathedral vs the Bazaar all over again. Microsoft Edge was a ground up rewrite of most of the browser (the Cathedral model of software dev) along with Android (built behind closed doors at Google, then code dumped right before a new major release). Mozilla didn't like how this model could easily backfire, choosing a more metered approach by developing smaller, swappable components in the open. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
- mr_toad 7y ago
  Gecko is the rendering engine. The JS engine is called SpiderMonkey.

jschwartzi 7y ago

I'd be interested in this on a modern smartphone platform with a touchscreen and virtual keyboard just to cut Google out of my life.

auslander 7y ago
> just to cut Google out of my life. Apple?
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  Out of the frying pan into the fire...
  - auslander 7y ago
    So it looks, but, realistically is the only option for phones. And it is not an adtech company, you pay for hardware and software.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
meruru 7y ago
Why not run Lineage OS then?
- Arelius 7y ago
  I dunno, switching from a phone with a pre-installed Google maintained OS to a custom rom of a Google maintained OS isn't exactally fully cutting Google out.
  - Yetanfou 7y ago
    AOSP and its derivatives may be maintained by Google but they don't call home without the proprietary Google apps. Just leave those off and use something like F-Droid to get apps and you're Google-free. None of the Android devices I use (phones and tablets) has any Google-proprietary code installed, all of them work fine without such.

thinkloop 7y ago

They needed the resources to integrate pocket into firefox

cronix 7y ago

It's kind of funny that PWA was Jobs original vision for iOS apps with HTML5, before they came up with the walled garden cash cow approach. > “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.” - Steve Jobs/iPhone announcement Jan 2007 at macworld https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/2019-the-year-of-progressive-web-apps-3027aea291f9 https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/2019-the-year-of-progr... What's old, is new again, 12 years later. It's how it always should have been. And guess what? There's no SDK that you need!! ;)

pjmlp 7y ago
An idea that was already being explored on Symbian with their WebRuntime actually. https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Web_Technologies/Web_Runtime/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum....
- stuaxo 7y ago
  I feel like the whole Symbian ecosystem disappeared, it's a shame nobody is preserving any of the software, that was 10+ years of tech that is basically gone.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Quite true. All what is left seems to be Web Archive and these sites. http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/ http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/
LeoPanthera 7y ago
It's not like this went away, though. You could always, and still can, write iOS apps this way. Safari even has the "add to home screen" feature which lets you run these apps without the Safari chrome around them.

on_and_off 7y ago

I don't know about its potential but what was there was not a serious challenger to the existing platforms. I was working for a very large app (tens of millions of daily users) at the time when firefox was trying to convince companies to port their apps to it. We were big enough that Firefox sent their advocates to our offices and tried to convince us to port our app. Since what we were offering was a service, we were naturally open to have it on as many platforms as possible. I think that there might have been a monetary incentive as well but I might be misremembering there (I was not part of that negotiation). After a week with their sdk and help from their devs, we threw the towel. Publishing our product on Fos would have been impossible while keeping the app quality on par with iOS and Android and there were lots of missing/buggy APIs. That was our last discussion with Firefox. For as long as there have been phones, there have been web apps targeting them, but there is a reason why we are still building native apps.

barbecue_sauce 7y ago

Are PWAs the next big thing? I thought the hype for PWAs had for the most part fizzled due to lack of user interest.

mr_toad 7y ago
It’s not the users that are pushing native apps on every website. It’s not even the developers. It’s the media and add companies that realise that they can get away with things in a native app that a browser would never allow.

stuaxo 7y ago

I hope it's got a lot more polished, I got one of the first firefox phones and it was pretty unusable in most areas. I pretty quickly got an Android phone instead.